


ignis fatuus

by chiaroscuros



Category: Fantastic Four (Comicverse), Infamous Iron Man - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Slight Canon Divergence, immediately post-Invincible Iron Man #600
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-22 02:29:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17051351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiaroscuros/pseuds/chiaroscuros
Summary: The first step to a solution was to examine and dissect. He needed a retrospective.Or, Victor von Doom makes his way home.





	ignis fatuus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Crait](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crait/gifts).



Latveria in late wintertime was more often than not enveloped in cloud cover, thick, cottony wisps of nimbostratus swathing the country in snow. It was now something Victor von Doom would become personally acquainted with, as he soared through the billowing masses of ice and frost in a haphazard path. It was by sheer muscle memory that he had even made it so far, working against a body wracked by fatigue and impaired vision, with thick spurts of blood obscuring whenever the wind whipped at his bared face.

 

Through half-lidded eyes, he recognized the familiar spread of countryside and his entire body nearly slumped in unconscious relief. The arc of his flight path curved, careening downward into the forests surrounding the capital. As he fell through foliage, what happened afterwards barely registered.

 

All he knew was the pain, falling into its embrace headlong.

 

Victor awoke sometime later, covered in a gentle dusting of snow, his cloak splayed out around him. He slowly sat himself upright against some stump of a tree, wiping caked blood and frigid dirt from his eyes. Victor blinked carefully then, squinting as his vision adjusted to the encroaching nighttime and took stock of his surroundings.

 

Even under layers of ice, he immediately recognized the species of blackthorn that grew around for miles, somehow nurtured by acidic mountain soil. _Stubborn_ soil, he knew firsthand, having coaxed herbs out of it as a child. He was a sapling in his own right back then, bent over in concentration with calloused fingers and knobbly knees dug in deep. It registered dimly in this fugue state, but the observation rung true and certain in him all the same: this was Mount Hortwurt.

 

With a hand clasping a neighboring tree trunk to steady himself, he slowly began to stand. In response, his vision swam at the edges and he shut his eyes tightly, resting his head against the frozen bark for a moment. A weaker man would’ve been bent over with exhaustion and he himself _felt_ it permeating his entire body, clawing at his insides, a yearning ache to rest, to close his eyes and never open them again –

 

Victor grunted, eyes flickering open, gaze firm and fixed on something faraway in the wood. After a moment, he began to walk. There would be time to rest later.

 

He was going to see his mother.

  

* * *

 

Prizing his hands out of his half-crushed metal gauntlets, he made to crouch in front of the grave, reaching out towards the rubble. Uncaring of the cold, his bare fingers swept away the ash and snow from the pieces of her makeshift grave-marker, rueful at his own older handiwork. Victor searched in silence for a minute or two, stopping abruptly once he found the small piece of flint that bore her name. _Cynthia von Doom_. He brought it closer to examine, running his thumbnail over the letters, roughly etched into the rock.

 

Almost unconsciously, he brought his other hand out from within his cloak to rest softly upon the frost-covered earth in front of him in silent greeting, his near dried, sticky blood staining the ground wine-dark. The encounter with the shade of Cynthia that the demon conjured weeks ago had rested heavy with him, heavier than he made known, and his mind had teemed with old, unwelcome memory ever since.

And now, especially here, in the familiar dark sprawl of Latveria’s forests, with his mother a few feet below him and her name under his fingertips, they sprung ever readily to his mind.

 

Memories of her, yes, those half-formed, amorphous things remembered through the haze of early childhood, more sensation than true recollection — a woman of warm touch, pealing laugh, gimlet-eye. But clearer than that now was the time after, the colder life defined by his mother’s absence, then his _father’s_ , and sharpened by the cruelty he had experienced firsthand. A childhood framed by candle wax and leather-bound books, an adolescence possessed by fire and brimstone, inevitably giving way to this life of cold, unyielding steel. A life of fury, righteous fury above all.

 

His gaze lingered for a few moments before rising and pocketing the smooth stone. No one else would need to know where she was buried. 

Victor knew the area implicitly. He would return again. 

 

And yet, he still found himself troubled. The dam had been breached and the onslaught of memory plagued him. His mind swam with past encounters and too-recent mistakes. And now that he had risen, the chilled air stung at the cuts upon his face once again, unwelcome reminders unto themselves, even if some part of him perversely relished in the familiar feeling, a marriage of interminable coldness and bitter hurt. It was still informed by a pain that went far deeper than skin, awakening something lodged deep in his marrow. It took him a moment to place the foreign emotion, seldom felt and even more seldom acknowledged. 

 

 _Shame_. 

 

The shame of making the same mistake twice. A second chance forsaken. Victor shied from the feeling, all too constrictive and almost pitiful in nature. But he found that he loathed the resultant atrophy that had possessed him in its wake even more, and so he resolved himself to action. 

 

He needed something to steady and focus the spirit, but knew with immediacy that he would not seek meditation. Especially now, when Stephen Strange would most likely be expecting him on the astral plane, looking to counsel and nobly guide him like shepherd to wayward livestock. The thought rankled, his lip curling painfully tight at the image his mind had conjured up; Victor did not need his insight nor his pity. He needed to clear his mind. He began walking eastward towards the river, his stride now emboldened with purpose, the crisp, frosty peat crunching underfoot. 

 

The first step to a solution was to examine and dissect. He needed a retrospective. 

Dilemma reframed, his mind already stirred at the promise of a problem to be solved. Bars of moonlight lanced through the trees as he walked, limning his figure in a pale, eerie glow. Had anyone seen him now, at this moment and in this state, they might think him something otherworldly, a forest spirit or a specter who haunted the wood. He had even been nigh-unrecognizable to everyone in Stark’s armor when he had first returned. And he found that disquieting, to have made himself a stranger amongst his people. 

 

His pace slowed as the riverbank came into view, beyond the last copse of trees ahead of him. The Kline was an intimate fixture of his early years, he knew its waters well; it would be suited enough for the task at hand. The plan had begun to congeal.

He had unraveled temporal displacement as a younger man, and while the machine he had built years ago was not with him now, rougher principles and innate ability remained. The light of a full moon, a clear surface, and the blood in his veins would be enough. He knew now what he wanted to do, what he wanted to _see_ , the witch’s son who had pored over his mother’s tomes for insight in his youth. What he _wanted_ was a scrying pool, but reconfigured to peel back the past, instead of divining the future.

 

His brow furrowed at the thought. The future…certainly not. Again, Victor found himself apprehensive at the idea of encountering another Sorcerer Supreme. When they had last met, the mirage of a prophetic Tony Stark had confounded rather than illuminated, and in light of recent events, the message he delivered had gained a rather bitter taste. But then it was not portents of the future but unbidden memory that nipped at his heels now, and he would face _this_ head on. In a fluid motion, he knelt beside the river, staring into its dark depths, contemplative.

 

The concept at its heart was simple, something true of magic as a whole, sister to the physical sciences.

 

(Absently, he recalled explaining it to the same pair of eyes in two different faces. A boy from a lifetime ago, his daughter years and years later – both children of rigid science, narrow-minded and immovable. Yet for some reason, he persisted.

 

“Akin to the law of conservation of mass,” Victor had said, first impatiently, and the second time less so. “Nothing is _truly_ unaccounted for. Matter is matter. And each piece of it has a distinct magical animus. To pull from the energy of another object or reshape the nature of things, restitution is needed. Simply put, if you want for something, you must give something in return, tit for tat.”)

 

Now, he asked a boon of the river and it required tribute.

 

Victor raised a hand a few inches above it and curled his fingers inward, roughly digging his nails in, worrying the raw, scarred skin of his palm. He squeezed achingly tight and five, six, seven thick droplets of blood, turned black under the moon, ran in rivulets from his fist into the brackish waters beneath. He unfolded the hand then, and thrice skimmed stained fingertips, already numb from the cold, across the surface in graceful, circular motions.

 

“Vigyél vissza,” he rasped, over and over. _Take me backwards._

 

At once, thin mist began to appear to curl around the path he had drawn with his hand. _Hover through the fog and filthy air_ , he thought drily, watching as it skittered across the edges of the water, forming a rough circle, the center of which began to gleam softly with the vestiges of witchfire, unnatural and more brilliant than the moonbeams to his back.

 

He leaned forward to regard it closely and drew his hand across the pool in a sweeping, left-to-right motion as if turning back the pages of a book. Thrumming with a sound like the susurration of wings, images began to appear in the luminescence: all those too-bright, too-sharp pivotal points that had pricked at his subconscious like thorns.

 

Scenes began to flit past rapidly, and his eyes widened in hungry survey, flickering back and forth to follow every motion. The watery echo of his own voice rose from the quiet hum, words of meaning from newer to older – “You’re _alive?”_ – “You abandoned your _family”_ –  “I will pick up your _mantle”_ – “I hold the heavens up just so the earth can tremble beneath me” – His breath caught at that last and he forced a hand in to still the waters. He swept his hand across impatiently, returning to the beginning.

 

Frozen still, staring across an ocean at the form of Tony Stark. Across a gulf of recovered memory at the form of Reed Richards. Two dead men. And still, he could not isolate the roiling emotions he felt faced with either of them at those moments. Victor’s lips tightened into a grim line, and he was suddenly frustrated with this train of thought. What he _felt_ mattered less than what it inevitably heralded. He knew now, their fresh reappearances poisoned the well of his intention and left him unmoored.

 

Nature abhorred a vacuum, and he had filled the voids they both had left. Donning new armor, assuming the role of protector in their absences, protecting the world and protecting Reed Richards’s family. He had done necessary work, and done it efficiently, but  –  an involuntary shudder from the cold made his fingers tremble, and with the slightest touch to the surface of the makeshift scrying pool, the scenes changed.

Now, he stared down images of distrust and hatred in the eyes of his beneficiaries as he had stepped into other men’s legacies, snatches of news reports that his eyes, on occasion, had been unwillingly drawn to.

 

 _Liar_ , they called him. A pretender, a wolf’s in sheep’s clothing. Victor von Doom had always been above the talk of the rabble, but the iron core of truth that ran through the words could not be denied. He put _himself_ in this position, belly exposed like a vulnerable animal in this new persona, waiting to be gutted by the presumption of the world.

 

His eyes coldly bore into these faces of disdain, absorbing their vitriol with bloodless assessment. They believed him incapable of fulfilling the spaces left by their fallen heroes and in this, he had condemned himself to eternal comparison.

 

He knew the emptiness of unopposed domination now, the futility in it, but the shock of the realization must have robbed him of his senses completely. Filling roles the world refused to accept him in, proffering assistance only to be rebuked. Even then, he had taken on these tasks with the assumption that no end was in sight.

He knew from the outset that it was thankless labor, but the fact remained that it was something the world needed even if they all could not recognize this on their own. Such was the burden of monarchy and too of heroism – making decisions on behalf of those who could not do so for themselves. A truth he was more than well aware of.

 

But now the complication that had stopped him dead in his tracks. But now _Stark_ was _alive_ , welcomed by the masses, and unaware of toil and loss he had undertaken in his name. _Richards_ was alive, and to be reunited with his family, Grimm and Storm, who would not remember him as anything but an anomalous shade at their backs.

 

Victor's jaw tightened as he swallowed down the acrid bitterness of it. It mattered not. He had not done what he had done to seek fulfillment from anyone but himself. In the end, he regretted none of it; he had done what he deemed necessary. His only fault was in reaching out to others. It was a lesson he had learned long ago, that the only variable he could control fully was himself. He needed no one, nothing. Nothing but himself to rely on.

 

It was time to shed this snakeskin.

 

 

For a final time, Victor lowered his palm to the water. And so, below him now, was the ugly reality of what he had left behind. Images of the land surrounding him. The rubble of his castle amidst his first encounter with Tony Stark as a changed man. He lingered for a moment at his own unblemished face, but then turned his eye to what lay in the background. Wandering, aimless children, militants littering the streets.

 

The plaintive scenes before his eyes stirred something in him. It was a familiar sight, the Latveria of his childhood, in the wake of parents’ death and his own craven flight from his homeland. It was a country left to its own devices, torn apart from the inside out. The nation in his absence, borne of a foolish notion to look to the earth at large and distance himself from what had anchored him to his old identity.

 

This was the one fatal mistake he would concede, this neglect of his birthright.

 

He rose to his feet and turned, his gaze following the twining path of the river through the forest, until the landscape fell away with undulating drama, giving way to a view of Doomstadt in nighttime, twining around the spires of his castle in the distance.

 

It was a reminder he had needed. This was where his guiding hand had belonged, certainly now, maybe always. It was time to rebuild.

 

Once more, he began to walk.


End file.
